Moscow, December 25th, 1991 (16 page)

But it was Gorbachev who was in decline. The new Soviet president was humiliated on May 1, 1990, when the pro-reform Moscow Club of Electors joined the end of the official May Day parade in Red Square. After the usual disciplined march of grateful workers chanting official slogans, thousands of raucous, angry, disrespectful Muscovites appeared carrying banners reading, “Gorbachev, resign” and “Down with the cult of Lenin.” Marchers with Lithuanian and Ukrainian flags stopped in front of Gorbachev to whistle and jeer. The benign expressions on the faces of the Politburo members on the Lenin Mausoleum turned to granite.

State television always continued live coverage of Red Square parades as long as the leaders remained on the Mausoleum. Now, these mortifying scenes were being broadcast to 150 million viewers across the USSR. The transmission was only stopped when a television director ran screaming into the studio to shut it down. After a few minutes of confusion, Gorbachev led his comrades off the platform, his shoulders hunched and his fedora hat pulled down, and ordered an investigation of the “political hooligans.” His flirtation with the democrats was over.

Raisa Gorbacheva felt the anger not just of the democrats but of the party conservatives who believed her husband was destroying their careers. When she went to the district party committee to pay her dues, she was appalled at the local party secretary’s spiteful attitude towards her. “I really feel he hated us,” she confided to Pavel Palazchenko. “They will never forgive Mikhail Sergeyevich.”
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Yeltsin meanwhile was being carried forward on a wave of pro-Russian nationalism. On May 17, 1990, a damp, overcast late spring day, the first freely elected Russian congress since before the Revolution met in the Great Kremlin Palace. The interior was dominated by the immense, theatrical picture by Boris Ioganson,
Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol.
The white, blue, and red flag of the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, which briefly ruled Russia in 1917, was carried into the debating chamber, and deputies responded with a standing ovation of several minutes. The tricolor, which originated as a naval and military ensign at the end of the seventeenth century in imitation of the Dutch colors and was first recognized as the flag of Russia in 1896, was banished after the October Revolution. More than anything else, its reappearance symbolized the beginning of the end of the seven-decades-long experiment in social engineering based on Karl Marx’s idea of a workers’ state. A couple of years earlier, people would have been arrested for displaying it.

Most of the deputies were party members, with views ranging from neo-Stalinist to radical democrat, but almost all were united in a desire to carve out greater sovereignty for Russia within the Soviet Union.

Yeltsin put himself forward for election as chairman of the presidium, in effect Russia’s head of state. Gorbachev let it be known he favored Alexander Vlasov, an uninspiring government functionary who was less threatening as a political rival. Though not an elected member, Gorbachev came to the Russian chamber to intimidate the deputies by his presence. He insisted that the president’s flag of the Union be placed beside him on a ten-foot pole to symbolize his new status. The only seat where the flag could be accommodated was in the balcony perched high above the chamber like a royal box. From there Gorbachev descended at intervals to lecture deputies on the risks of voting for his former comrade. From the podium he accused Yeltsin of abandoning socialist principles and working for the destruction of the Soviet Union.

In the congress 40 percent of deputies were solidly for Yeltsin and 40 percent against. The remaining 20 percent—known as the “swamp”—resented Gorbachev’s interference and leaned to Yeltsin. On May 29 the Siberian won a secret ballot with 535 votes, 4 more than the absolute majority required. For the first time Gorbachev had failed to get his preferred candidate elected for a leadership post in the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev learned the result while reclining in one of the leather seats of the blue and white Soviet presidential airliner midway across the Atlantic, en route to Ottawa and a summit meeting in Washington with President Bush. His aides drafted a conciliatory telegram of congratulations, acknowledging, “You have shown yourself to be a real fighter.” Gorbachev rejected it, saying Yeltsin didn’t need that kind of backhanded compliment.
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Though he conceded that they were now going to have to negotiate with Yeltsin, he didn’t congratulate the winner for a week.

In the United States, President Bush received Gorbachev at the White House, and they traveled together by helicopter the fifty miles to Camp David. They were hemmed in by two plainclothes officers: an American air force major with a metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase in a black leather casing strapped to his wrist and a Russian colonel with a little black suitcase also attached to his forearm—the respective doomsday devices for the two presidents to launch nuclear war against each other.

At Camp David Gorbachev drove Bush around in a golf cart. His driving was on a par with Yeltsin’s: He almost overturned it to avoid a tree, as the colonels careened along behind them. Over a lunch of hot sorrel soup, Bush asked Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s new role in Soviet politics. Yeltsin is not a “serious person,” retorted the Soviet president. “He’s become a destroyer.”
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The destroyer was meanwhile enjoying his spoils. After his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin and his loyal sidekick, Lev Sukhanov, took the lift to the fifth floor of the Russian White House to occupy the office of the previous titleholder. They were amazed to find it was as big as a dance hall. “I have seen many an office in my life,” Yeltsin related, “but I got a pleasant tingle from the soft modern sheen, all the shininess and comfort.” Sukhanov said in wonderment, “Look Boris Nikolayevich, what an office we’ve seized!” Yeltsin had a subversive thought that frightened him. “We haven’t just seized an office. We’ve seized an entire Russia!” His campaign against perks notwithstanding, he soon took over for his own use a well-staffed mansion previously used as a vacation retreat of the Russian Council of Ministers in Arkhangelskoye.

On settling into work, Yeltsin dismissed the KGB guards assigned to the office and installed his ex-KGB pal Alexander Korzhakov at the head of a new security unit. For the first few days the corridors outside his vast office were strangely quiet. The staff of the old administration went into hiding, expecting that Yeltsin would fire them too and put in his own people. Yeltsin called the employees together and told them he would keep them on if they wished. Most stayed.

There was a whiff of cordite in the air as the confrontation with Gorbachev sharpened. Yeltsin and his staff began acquiring weapons for personal protection, helped by sympathizers in the Soviet defense and interior ministries. Within a year, he later reckoned, his security directorate had collected sixty assault rifles, a hundred pistols, two bulletproof jackets, and five Austrian walkie-talkies.

Though leader of a country almost twice the size of the United States, Yeltsin had little power. He could not raise taxes. He had no army. He was unable to speak to the people on state television, which was still controlled by the Kremlin. Glasnost had not advanced to the point at which political opponents of the USSR leadership could command time on the airwaves. The Russian Supreme Soviet remained what it had always been—a decoration, part of a Soviet-era fiction that republics governed themselves, whereas in reality they had no control over people or resources.

Yeltsin and his deputies were determined to change that. They hoped to take some power away from the center and establish enough sovereignty to get Russia out of its economic crisis. He proposed that Russia’s laws should be made superior to Soviet laws and take precedence in the territory of Russia, a popular move even with the conservative Russian deputies. “There were numerous options,” Yeltsin recounted, “but we had only one—to win!”

On June 12, 1990, the parliament adopted a Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR by a vote of 907 votes to 13 against and 9 abstentions. The vote was greeted by a standing ovation. The date would be celebrated in the future as Russia Day. Yeltsin would reflect in time that “as soon as the word
sovereignty
resounded in the air, the clock of history once again began ticking and all attempts to stop it were doomed. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.”

All over the USSR in the weeks that followed, other republics took their cue from Russia and proclaimed their sovereignty in a wave of nationalism. In many republics the campaign for greater independence was supported not just by nationalists but by hard-line members of the communist
nomenklatura,
who fretted about Gorbachev’s reform policies and aimed to grab power for themselves.

Gorbachev’s perestroika had by now created a situation in which the USSR could be preserved only by a new union treaty or by military force.

The immensity of what was happening gave Yeltsin “a bad case of the shakes.” The system could no longer crush him openly, he believed, but “it was quite capable of quietly eating us, bit by bit.” It could sabotage his actions, and him. Gorbachev still controlled the KGB, the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, the Central Bank, state television, and other instruments of control. He was commander of the armed forces, the ultimate arbiter in a physical struggle for power.

But Gorbachev was losing the people. By mid-summer 1990, most Russians had stopped paying heed to his speeches. Life was not improving. After five years waiting for a “crucial turning point” that was never reached, people were dismissing his lectures as
mnogo slov
(“so many words,” “a lot of hot air”). Behind his back party secretaries were calling him Narciss, the Narcissist. (Gorbachev’s secretaries termed Yeltsin “Brevno,” or The Log, the Russian equivalent of “thick as a plank.”)
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The shops and liquor stores were still empty.

When Gorbachev made a typically long-winded address to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on July 2, 1990, almost nobody was listening. “There are voices which say that in all our failures perestroika is to blame—this is simply rubbish,” he said, his eyes glinting behind steel-rimmed spectacles as he surveyed the rows of fidgeting party officials and hard-jawed military generals among the delegates. “The abandoned state of our farms . . . the massive ecological problems . . . the national and ethnic problems . . . have not arisen yesterday but have their roots in the past.... We must continue with perestroika.” He got five seconds of desultory applause.

It was Gorbachev’s turn to sit stone-faced as Yegor Ligachev, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov—whom Gorbachev had appointed in the belief that he was a reformer—won thunderous applause as one after another they denounced “antisocialist elements” in the party. Their real target was Gorbachev himself, who privately admitted to Shakhnazarov not long before that he was “close to social democracy.”
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For communists, there was nothing worse than a social democrat.

The most “antisocialist element,” Boris Yeltsin, instinctively knew that power was draining away from the ruling party. He staged yet another dramatic démarche. He went to the podium to declare that as chairman of the Russian parliament he preferred “to bow to the will of all the people” rather than follow the instructions of the party. He was therefore suspending his membership. He made a show of turning in his red cardboard party card, Number 03823301, issued by the Sverdlovsk party committee on March 17, 1961. To shouts of “Shame!” Yeltsin strode from the hall. He was convinced he had inflicted a severe blow against Gorbachev, who watched his “ostentatious exit” from the platform.

The Russian leader was followed out by several radicals, including Anatoly Sobchak, soon to be mayor of Leningrad, whose staff included the future president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Still at that time an officer of the KGB, Putin would not turn in his party card for another year and a half.

Gorbachev had few illusions about the caliber of the party hacks left behind after the walkout or of their hatred of him. Following a meeting with regional party secretaries, he privately cursed the “self-interested scum that don’t want anything except a feeding trough and power.” But he resisted the urging of Alexander Yakovlev and Anatoly Chernyaev to resign as general secretary and follow Yeltsin out of the party, fearing this could split society and risk civil war. As Chernyaev later put it, “Only Yeltsin, with his animal instinct, heard the distant thunder of history.”

“You must understand me,” Gorbachev explained to Chernyaev. “I can’t let this lousy, rabid dog off the leash. If I do that, all this huge structure will be turned against me.”
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He had to keep the colossus of conservatism under control, or it would overthrow perestroika. The alternatives were to cooperate with the power-hungry Yeltsin in administering a dose of shock therapy to the economy, which would involve giving the republics more freedom and risk a coup by empire loyalists, or to throw in his lot with the conservatives and try to coerce the Soviet republics into the kind of submission that Stalin had achieved. Whatever option he chose, it was clear that the USSR was in deep crisis.

The Soviet president was also painfully aware of the problem in having so many nationalities to govern. He once cited to Margaret Thatcher the well-known quip by Charles de Gaulle about the difficulty of governing a country with more than one hundred and twenty different kinds of cheese. How much harder it was to run a country with one hundred and twenty different nationalities, Gorbachev said. “Yes, especially if there is no cheese,” ad-libbed one of his aides.
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